Schroedinger's Glory Hole:SilkRoad had a near monopoly. The only two players left are Sheep and BMR, and more markets will emerge in the coming weeks. Old vendors will be able to verify their identities with old customers that still have the PGP keys. The government just created competition in a black market that previously had very little. I think the already fantastic prices on SilkRoad are about to be beat by a significant amount.

Nonsense! Shutting down Napster ended music piracy on-line and it seems reasonable to expect the same results from this action against Silk Road.

skozlaw:jigger: He thought he was forever safe because it was over Tor.

He was running a criminal organization that's open to every random idiot that can install Tor and find it and he didn't think maybe some day a few of the 'tards would get caught on the far end of a compromised node, shaken down and start sending the feds up the tree toward him?

U.S. law enforcement authorities have shut down "Silk Road," an anonymous Internet marketplace for illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine and criminal activities such as murder for hire, and arrested its alleged owner.

js34603:The strange part of this is he's running a multi million dollar operation and still got a public defender. WTF.

/hire a lawyer drug dealers, do it now, before you get caught not after they seize your farking assets

I knew a guy that gave his lawyer a safety deposit box key in case of just such an emergency. The only problem was the staggering amount of money he put into the thing and it just sat there. We're talking 7 figures.

There were totally legal things to buy there. (In fact, couldn't you legally buy Marijuana from SR if you lived in Washington & Colorado?- well not Federally I guess) So the feds don't really have the right to seize everyone's BTC in my opinion.

It would be like seizing your bank account because the BANK was doing something nefarious.

SilkRoad had a near monopoly. The only two players left are Sheep and BMR, and more markets will emerge in the coming weeks. Old vendors will be able to verify their identities with old customers that still have the PGP keys. The government just created competition in a black market that previously had very little. I think the already fantastic prices on SilkRoad are about to be beat by a significant amount.

Harry Freakstorm:U.S. law enforcement authorities have shut down "Silk Road," an anonymous Internet marketplace for illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine and criminal activities such as murder for hire, and arrested its alleged owner.

But craigslist is still up and running?

Silk Road should just cite the Communications Decency act of 1996 then al will be forgiven. Works for craigslist and backpage.

So the guy was basically caught because he advertised his site on a drug forum with the username 'altoid', then 8 months later used the same username on a different site, asking for advice on how to configure TOR sites, with responses to be sent to a gmail account with his real name on it. Real smooth.

ULBRICHT, a/k/a "Dread Pirate Roberts," a/k/a a/k/a "Silk Road," the defendant, in connection with operating the Silk Road website, solicited a Silk Road user to execute a murder--for--hire of another Silk Road user, who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users of the site.